Balanced but supportive, aware of DCP’s problems yet cautiously optimistic—a persuasive brief for an alternative kind of...
Ground-level profile of a California charter school, from a San Jose Mercury News education reporter.
Charter schools broke onto the public education scene 25 years ago, Jacobs writes, because teachers and administrators were fed up with the “impenetrable mass of bureaucracy that crushes creativity, chokes innovation, and gobbles up education funds.” Devised by educational reformers (parents, community activists and others) with the hesitant blessings of the American Federation of Teachers, charter schools now enroll nearly a million students at some 3,400 sites across the country. They are public schools, Jacobs explains, but each is run by its own board and exempt from some state regulations; they also receive less state funding than district-run schools. Charter-school teachers are usually young, hard workers who don’t necessarily have an education degree and (the big sticking point for the AFT) are not unionized. The teachers are held accountable for results, as are the kids. Downtown College Prep (DCP), the San Jose school Jacobs depicts, expects its students to display respect, a sense of pride and community and a willingness to work—something of a challenge for their target group of D and F students in traditional public schools. Jacobs witnessed administrative stumbles, as well as student vandalism, violence, defiance and other trappings of gang life. Yet she also saw the school instill self-discipline, responsibility and a work ethic in kids who were in jeopardy. The teachers’ and administrators’ patience, dedication and enthusiasm bore significant fruit. During the year Jacobs chronicles, grades consistently went up, participation in all aspects of school was strong and the general mood was hopeful. Charters are still experiments, and not all succeed, she writes, but those that don’t will close, unlike the failing schools in the consequence-free traditional system.
Balanced but supportive, aware of DCP’s problems yet cautiously optimistic—a persuasive brief for an alternative kind of public education.Pub Date: Dec. 11, 2005
ISBN: 1-4039-7023-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2005
Carefully researched and chilling, if somewhat overwritten.
Comprehensive, myth-busting examination of the Colorado high-school massacre.
“We remember Columbine as a pair of outcast Goths from the Trench Coat Mafia snapping and tearing through their high school hunting down jocks to settle a long-running feud. Almost none of that happened,” writes Cullen, a Denver-based journalist who has spent the past ten years investigating the 1999 attack. In fact, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold conceived of their act not as a targeted school shooting but as an elaborate three-part act of terrorism. First, propane bombs planted in the cafeteria would erupt during lunchtime, indiscriminately slaughtering hundreds of students. The killers, positioned outside the school’s main entrance, would then mow down fleeing survivors. Finally, after the media and rescue workers had arrived, timed bombs in the killers’ cars would explode, wiping out hundreds more. It was only when the bombs in the cafeteria failed to detonate that the killers entered the high school with sawed-off shotguns blazing. Drawing on a wealth of journals, videotapes, police reports and personal interviews, Cullen sketches multifaceted portraits of the killers and the surviving community. He portrays Harris as a calculating, egocentric psychopath, someone who labeled his journal “The Book of God” and harbored fantasies of exterminating the entire human race. In contrast, Klebold was a suicidal depressive, prone to fits of rage and extreme self-loathing. Together they forged a combustible and unequal alliance, with Harris channeling Klebold’s frustration and anger into his sadistic plans. The unnerving narrative is too often undermined by the author’s distracting tendency to weave the killers’ expressions into his sentences—for example, “The boys were shooting off their pipe bombs by then, and, man, were those things badass.” Cullen is better at depicting the attack’s aftermath. Poignant sections devoted to the survivors probe the myriad ways that individuals cope with grief and struggle to interpret and make sense of tragedy.
Carefully researched and chilling, if somewhat overwritten.Pub Date: April 6, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-446-54693-5
Page Count: 406
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
A somewhat fictionalized account of Minahan's semester at Brown ``in the early 1980's.'' There, as an adjunct lecturer, he taught a writing course called ``Democracy and Education,'' in which students discussed texts from the Declaration of Independence to the writings of E.D. Hirsch, and subjects from race, class, and gender to the ills of society. The students here are composites—allegorical types: the lazy, the passionate, the idealistic, the methodical, the manipulative, the arrogant, the silent; Ray, Toshiro, Pete, Rahjiv, Helga, and Juanita—the sort of cultural array that admissions officers fantasize about. Meanwhile, Minahan is critical of contemporary ideology; of political correctness, as well as of the DWM (dead white male) curriculum; of the cultural poverty of ``American education'' and ``college students today'' (who don't know Latin or the meaning of ``transcendentalism''); of a system that hires black women without Ph.D.s while he's unemployed (``Shit''); and of the ultimate disease—greed—the ``American illness'' perpetuated on campuses. But he likes his own students, plus Allan Bloom and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, and he advocates compassion (``the only idea that makes any sense'')—which he defines in increasingly general ways until concluding that ``the society we get is the society we deserve.'' But while Minahan criticizes US education- -students, faculty, the MLA—his book offers neither cogent analysis nor solutions but, ironically, is itself symptomatic of a problem. Hired to teach writing, the author presents opinions as truth, ideology as ideas, polemic as rhetoric, cultural diagnoses as ``personal essays,'' stereotypes as style. If he were one of his students, Minahan probably would find that his own writing—replete with generalizations, shifting voice (the implicative ``we'' and accusing ``you''), and lack of discipline—would earn him a recommendation to change his major.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1993
ISBN: 1-883285-01-1
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Delphinium
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1993
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